The Only Hoax About Climate Change is the Fairy Tale Told by Oil Industry-Funded Climate Sceptics

The so-called “environmental skeptics” have claimed for years that the temperature of the earth is not getting too high or that human activities are not responsible for it. In 1997, pro-business magazine The Wall Street Journal, thundered: “Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is A Myth.”[1] In the United States, Republican Senator James Inhofe, argued that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world.”[2] Some years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by Exxon, aired two 60-second TV ads with the slogan: “CO2: They Call It Pollution, We Call It Life.” Similar claims are still widely heard today. As former wannabe presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently argued: “I have never believed in the ‘hoax of global warming.’”

Profusely paid by the fossil-fuel industry,[3] and widely covered by corporate media,[4] many environmental skeptics have grown in popularity in recent years. After the leaked emails scandal of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, also known as “Climategate,” many critics were even more convinced that the science of climate change had been debunked. One wishes that that they were right and that global warming is nothing but a fabrication. But it is hardly so. As David Biello wrote, in an editorial in Scientific American, “sadly for the potential fate of human civilization, rumors of the demise of climate change have been much exaggerated.”[5]

An industrial amount of evidence has already provided robust scientific support to the climate-change hypothesis. In particular, ice cores from Antarctica, holding measurements that dated back about 650,000 years, have provided compelling information confirming the validity of the relationship between changes in atmospheric concentration of CO2 and temperature. They hold data covering 6 and a half cycles of ice ages and inter-glacial, showing that CO2 levels and temperatures went up and down together like synchronized dancers.[6] For instance, during the last glaciation, the concentration of CO2 was about 180 parts per million (ppm.) It rose to 280ppm after the ice age ended, about 12,500 years ago. Since then, levels remained stable, until the industrial revolution when they started to increase reaching 380ppm in recent years. A more recent study providing an 800,000-year reconstruction of the same variables confirmed these trends.[7]

The significance of this research is startling. For million years the earth’s climate has had just two states: glacial and interglacial – the 100,000-year cycles of ice ages and inter-glacial coincided with minor wobbles in the Earth’s orbit. The glacial states have been anchored at CO2 of roughly 180ppm, while the interglacial states were anchored at about 280ppm.[8] Since the industrial revolution, however, human activities have increased the amount of CO2 by 100ppm. Given that CO2 levels have reached 380ppm, we basically contributed to a change in the atmosphere almost as large as the one that usually occurs between an ice age and an inter-glacial. In other words, we are already moving into uncharted territory, a totally new state for planet Earth, or what Nobel-prize winning Paul Crutzen defined as the era of “Anthropocene.”[9]

The majority of climate scientists no longer have any doubt that the increase of 0.6-0.8°C in the average temperature over the last 150 years is the consequence of two centuries of man-made excessive pollution and deforestation. As the IPCC report explained: “Global atmosphere concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.”[10]

The IPCC, repeatedly attacked by the skeptics, is not alone in its view. The same conclusion was endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies, including every one of all the national academies of science in major industrialized countries. Among them, we find the US National Academy of Sciences[11], the American Meteorological Society[12], the American Geophysical Union[13] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science[14]. The only exception is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, of course [15] Other organizations that disagree with the general consensus include the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and the George Marshall Institute – all of which receive funding from the oil industry. In fact, their conflict of interest is so wildly apparent that most scientists hardly take them seriously.

What most scientists take very seriously instead are the long-term consequences of climate change for at least two reasons. First, if CO2 levels co-vary with temperatures, further increases of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to additional rises in the global temperature.[16] Secondly, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere keeps rising by approximately 20ppm a decade. This means that, in the absence of drastic change, CO2 is expected to rise to 600ppm or more by the end of the century. If the least optimistic predictions of the IPCC are correct, by this time, planet Earth will experience the same temperature rise that usually occurs between an ice age and an inter-glacial.[10]

What would be the effects of this drastic temperature rise on people’s lives and planet earth? Most likely devastating. As Jim Hansen, former NASA specialist and George Bush’s top climate scientist once put it, we are “on the slippery slope to hell.”[17]